Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for September 10, 2015

Here is an in depth New York Times article about the McDonald’s coffee law suit.

It goes into detail of the suffering the plaintiff went through. The fact that McDonald’s maintained a policy of keeping the coffee heated at an extreme level event hough they knew it was dangerous. She was not the first person to be injured by the overheated coffee served by McDonald’s.

I read that the elderly customer’s crotch was severely burned, and the McLawyers argued in court that, because of her age, she had no more use for that part of her body anyway.:This is why so many people equate “corporate lawyer” with “scumbag.”

Actually, that’s the origin of the “Stella Award”, given to the most frivolous lawsuits presented at courts. Go look it up, it’s very funny.On the other hand, is he dead? If so, he could be nominated to the “Darwin Award”

Hmmm, going with Rat on this one.

It would appear that you and Sherlock didn’t take the time to watch the link that LWP provided. Please take the time to do so. Just like Ford had the knowledge and opportunity to correct a dangerous defect in the Pinto and neglected to do so, McDonald’s could have taken the high road- and didn’t. Shame on them.Leftwingpatriot, thanks for your posting. I never knew the whole story.

Actually, she wasn’t in a moving car when the coffee spilled, the car was parked so she could add cream and sugar. McDonald’s was also aware that the coffee was served at a temperature hot enough to cause serious burns and had complaints from over 700 customers who had been previously injured by the coffee, with the company paying over $500,000 in settlements.

You don’t have to like the outcome of this particular case, but you should at least base your dislike on the real facts of the case instead of kind of nonsense found in your average email forward.

Some people are not competent to drive and consume food simultaneously – they are a risk to the public and should be locked away.

You want one lump or two with that?

Go, Rat! Speedy justice is real justice! And, besides, he deserved it. People need to take responsibility for their own stupidity.

In a town near where I grew up, a woman deliberately (this was admitted) stood in the path of a blind man, who stepped on her toe and broke it. She sued him for thousands for medical bills and “pain and suffering”, and her husband sued on the grounds that his wife was not able to do as much housework while she recovered. They also sued the trainers of the blind man’s seeing-eye dog. I don’t think I ever heard how the suit was resolved.

If I had been in rat’s position, I would have broken all the rest of their toes.

ahhh…finally a just judge….and wouldn’t you know it……it would have to be a rat…

That seemed just.

It would not have been just in the actual case. But then, Rat is never just, is he?

My favorite: I bought one of those folding screens you put in the windshield to keep the sun out when you’re parked so when you get into the car you can touch the steering wheel without getting burned. In the lower corner was a WARNING: DO NOT OPERATE VEHICLE WITH THIS SCREEN IN PLACE!. I just laughed and said, “a lawyer’s been here.” Crazy world, ain’t it?

Great thanks to leftwingpatriot et al. for posting accurate details about the McDonald’s debacle. Apparently cartoon boy wasn’t informed about the facts.

The real question is, who doesn’t know that coffee has always been served hot, and that it’s hot enough to burn you? I’m pretty sure that everyone that has ever had a cup of coffee knows that.

WAY TO GO, RAT!!!!

RAT FOR PRES!

Yes, I agree. But the ones who are for her all want to get a chance to win big in some lawsuit or other. I watch World’s Dumbest where they show people spilling oil in the aisle of a supermarket then walking and slipping on it to get money. They’re too dumb to realize they’ve been recorded, LOL!

She also originally wanted to settle for just getting her medical bills paid, but McDs said no.

I liked the reader’s comment “People are greedy and always looking for unearned wealth !” It might be slick to change the word “People” to “Heathen”. More and more fine upstanding US citizens are migrating to this category of person.

McDonald’s coffee was at the same temperature that coffee comes from your home coffeemaker. 195F is the minimum temperature to extract the flavor oils from coffee grounds. If you pour from the coffeemaker into a ceramic mug, the mug absorbs some heat and reduces the temperature, but then you have a fairly short time to drink the coffee before it cools too far. That doesn’t work for takeout coffee, where the customer is going somewhere before drinking the coffee – to keep it hot enough to taste right for over 30 minutes, you have to put quite hot coffee in an insulated disposable cup.

McDonald’s mistake was not lining up a pack of expert witnesses to tell the jury these facts about coffee, and to refute the plaintiff’s witnesses who measured coffee temperature served in ceramic mugs at sit-down restaurants rather than take-out places. Instead, they apparently just expected the jurors to use what they knew, that coffee is “hot” – but most people don’t know what that means in terms of temperature measurements, and for once a jury followed their instructions and ruled based only on the evidence presented at trial.

Yay, rat!

Rat got it right that time.

For once, I agree with rat. That was just compensation.

There is a professional organization associated with coffee brewing. This group maintained for years before this incident that the right temperature for coffee was in the range that McDonalds kept theirs. To say it was ‘excessively’ hot is not reasonable, since it was at the coffee industry standard temperature. It is only ‘excessively’ hot when you pour it on yourself because you took the lid off while in motion.

i just love coffee

People are rooting for Rat. Very odd. I would interpret this strip as Pastis using Rat as his mouthpiece for wrongheaded and mean-spirited attitudes, just as he normally does. Certainly no person in possession of the facts, and with any ability to reason, would act as Rat does here.

I have never had coffee in my life.

I don’t think I’d want to either. Tea is much healthier.

xxx

Holding hot coffee steady, aware that it’s hot – these are all the little myriad of risks we take as we live life…..or…waaaaa whichever you prefer…

Exactly! So many people are either ignorant of the fact that she only requested help with her medical bills initially and finally sued as a last resort when the company refused, or they simply don’t care.

There are those that mix this event with the criminally greedy individuals who are after a get rich scheme. Many of these also are ignorant of thermodynamics and the process of heat loss.Near boiling is a great temperature for the brewing process of coffee. What many people don’t understand is that a coffeemaker doesn’t have to keep coffee that hot AFTER the blending of the water and beans. Use an infrared thermometer on a coffeepot sitting on the heating coils and you will see a difference. Note also that the coffee will cool more from heat dispersion while being poured into a cup and by heat exchange with the cup.A little known fact is that cooling is nonlinear and the rate of heat loss from a very high temperature is greater than from a lower temperature.Sorry for the science lesson.

Apparently the guy didn’t put enough money in the tip jar…

An interesting tidbit I haven’t seen mentioned, is the fact that, yes, McDonald’s had been sued numerous times before for this same sort of thing, and each time they won the lawsuit.In fact, it probably would be considered in the “Slip and Fall” category of suit. It’s raining, a customer slips on the sidewalk in front of an establishment, sues the establishment for not keeping the sidewalk dry in the rain. Happens all the time. In the US, people sue for anything and everything. They unjustly win a frightening number of times.But the interesting thing is, one of the arguments presented by the plaintiff was the repeated lawsuits against McDonald’s. They used that as evidence against them. Essentially, one of the reasons they lost this case was thanks to successfully winning every other similar case.

I don’t care if she’s an injured grandma. She’s an idiot. And if you think only mega-corps like McDonald’s are the ones being sued by idiots, you got another think coming.We want justice and fairness for all, and being a mega-corp doesn’t mean we can stop being fair. It was nobody’s fault but her own, no matter how much people try to spin it.McDonald’s has the resources to defend itself, but most lawsuit defendants fall victim to this same twisted logic, and it can cost them their entire livelihood. Ultimately, we all lose in cases like this. (except the lawyers, of course)

She wasn’t driving, she got third-degree burns on the inner thighs, genitals, and buttocks, requiring skin grafts and debriding… and only sued for the cost of her medical bills, so around $20,000. The coffee was kept at a temperature of 185 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to cause extremely severe burns, and McDonald’s KNEW it was dangerous — they’d already had more than 700 complaints of burns before this lawsuit.

The whole “Ooooh, stupid old lady filed frivolous lawsuit because she was too dumb to know coffee is hot, ha ha” thing drives me up a wall.

“The arguement was that she open the lid in a moving car which caused the injury not the coffee being over heated.”Multiple people have posted links to the case, which all state clearly that the car was not moving. If you’re going to open your mouth about that case either way, at least get the basic facts straight.

How many people here would put a hot cup of coffee near their genitals, and take the lid off? I don’t care if the coffee is 160 or 190, I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. And, as a side topic, when was the last time you saw a car without cup-holders? I haven’t seen one in well over 40 years.

I don’t believe you can get 3rd degree burns from boiling water — maybe Carl R could speak to superheated steam. Unless granny was going commando her clothing would have absorbed much of the initial heat “in a couple of seconds.” Furthermore, skin only melts in Indiana Jones movies. Can we have some more realistic symptoms please?

I hear that the influencing factor in this trial was less about the physical evidence and more about the apparent crassness of McDonald’s Corp lawyers and their representation of the rest of the company.

Rat – YOU DA MAN!!! Any idiot who puts a HOT cup of liquid between their legs, spills it, and then whines about being burned is a MORON. And deserves a whack on the noggin.

I’m really sad to see this trope continuing here… the woman who sued the company was elderly, and the hot was well beyond safe temperature when it was served to her. She required multiple surgeries to graft her skin where she was severely burned. If that happened to your own grandmother, would you call her a moron? If it happened to you, you would just pay for the damage yourself? When the woman died, she was not rich. Get a clue, people. And some empathy while you’re at it.

So…whether one agrees with the case or not, how has it affected us all? Initially some places lowered the coffee temperature, which customers found unacceptable. (I was one who just started making my own, and still do). In the end most places put warnings on the cups that coffee is hot, and raised the temperatures back up to normal levels, and added to the price of the coffee to cover legal expenses. Are we better off with higher prices and warnings on the cups? Some would say yes, I guess, and some would say no.

It will be denied, but there were warning then. Warnings that everyone ignored.

The hot-coffee McDonald’s lawsuit is one of those things that has settled into more urban legend than fact, remembered only in an oversimplified way that has little to do with the facts of the case. Thanks to those who shared the full details – I too felt the same way as some here before I learned the eye-opening facts.

And yes, some empathy, folks, please!

But one outcome of this sort of case—doctors ordering all sorts of CYA (Cover Your Abdomen) tests that drive up health-care costs, silly warnings on all sorts of “dangerous” items such as “This product is not to be used in bathrooms” on a bathroom heater, or “Use care when operating a car” on a bottle of dog’s pills.

This is probably a dead thread, but one thing I’m old enough to recall is that most “to go” cups were flimsier back around that time. Also, most drive throughs will ask what you want in the coffee, so you don’t have to open the lid in the car.Parting shot to the guy trying to pin the higher price of coffee on this lawsuit: Starbucks & global supply shortages drove up the price of coffee. The amount of money involved in that settlement is ridiculously trivial for an industry that grosses $30 billion a year.

I always have my coffee at boiling point and I take care not to burn myself.

What next? Suing haaggen-daz for frostbite? Look, coffee is made with boiling water and boiling water is hot. Deal with it! Or switch to ice coffee.